Should the US Really Limit Chinese-Government Influenced IT Systems? 220
coondoggie writes "New federal restrictions now preclude four U.S. agencies from buying information-technology (IT) systems from manufacturers 'owned, directed or subsidized by the People's Republic of China' due to national-security concerns. But is this a smart tactic? It's clear that some in the U.S. government, including the House Intelligence Committee — which issued a scathing report last fall that called Huawei and ZTE a threat to national security — and the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. are also working in other ways behind the scenes to keep technology made by China-based manufacturers out of U.S. commercial networks as well."
Re:Full Retard Mode Activate! (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on what you mean by conclusive, but there's a motive and there's a capability. For the capability part, see:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/05/backdoor_found.html [schneier.com]
Re:Full Retard Mode Activate! (Score:5, Informative)
you basically can't buy a computer without having at least some of its parts source, assembled, or otherwise passing through China
For really top secret stuff, you can, they should, and they do. It goes as far as getting the NSA its own chip fabrication facility at ft. meade. Do you want to work there? [nsa.gov]
Re:Some, anyway (Score:3, Informative)
The funny thing is most han Chinese are horribly racist and massively nationalistic. My wife's Chinese from Beijing (and han) and the things I've heard people say who don't realize this laowai speaks Chinese would make the KKK blush.
Re:Take it further (Score:3, Informative)
I'm just saying the last 30 years have been a superating wound on the middle class with no end in site, and our government is about to cut the social safety net completely away leaving the poorest and least able to take care of themselves without means to live.
I have a somewhat bitter solution here. Gut US spending everywhere so that the federal budget isn't a boat anchor on US competitiveness. Second, in addition to that, seriously cut back on anything that makes US workers more expensive. This includes environmental and worker safety regulation as well as some cutting of those "safety nets", particularly Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid (both which greatly harm labor competitiveness in the US).
The focus here is on cost reduction of employment which means that some regulations may be retained just by changing how the business is required to report things to a less expensive method. But some other regulations should just be cut back or dropped such as weakening threshold limits for chemicals in the workplace.
In addition, drop minimum wage substantially. I'd favor getting rid of it altogether so that the US isn't spending money at all on that particular regulation. Remember that the actual minimum wage is always $0 per hour. Anything above that is a win for your economy.
Strip out prepaid medical care and elective medical care as a requirement of health insurance. Reverse Obamacare and get employers out of the health insurance business.
And finally, I suggest growing up and reducing your expectations. The fundamental problem is that the pool of labor for global business has increased by a factor of several. Most of those people will work for much less than developed world workers do. Similarly, regulations are much less stringent leading to the greatest economic migrations of capital of all time.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to concerns about the developed world and the US in particular becoming "third world". But keeping expensive systems in place while discouraging the growth of US businesses, is just hastening the US's decline in wealth. I figure a controlled reduction of standard of living is better than the "drowning man" approach of attempting and failing hard to maintain past standards of living. It's not going to be a wonderful place, if government is no longer able to regulate pollution or arrest criminals. You can have the best standards of law and regulation and still be a disaster merely because none of those laws are enforced.
The US labor market has a particularly hard time because of all the punishments that have been heaped upon the act of employing someone. For example, a number of businesses are restructuring their labor force this year so that they can get under the 50 full time employees mark and save a lot of money (Obamacare charges a fine of $2k per employee past the first 30 employees for businesses that don't provide insurance, it's at least $40k in savings with this trick).
For example, if you have 100 full time employees now, you can save $140k (which is several employees' salaries) by restructuring as a company that has oh, 40 full time employees and maybe 120 half time employees. That game is going to have nasty consequences for the US labor force down the road.
I myself tend to long for the days a somewhat more protectionist American economy.
So what? There are cases where protectionism has worked to build an economic powerhouse. Japan did it twice, once in the late 19th century and once after the Second World War in the "Japanese miracle". Paraguay did something similar in the mid 19th century (before its epic fail in the Paraguayan War). And a number of Far East countries have followed the blueprints of the Japanese miracle.
So protectionism can work. But what do all of those have in common? An obsessive focus on industry building over labor. Labor always gets short shrift. Protectionism with a focus on labor or the "safety net" i